WORKSHOP: Social Policy as Crime Prevention, Cambridge, MA, Summer, 2010.

National Bureau Of Economic Research Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

People commit crime for a wide variety of reasons, some related to persistent social problems such as poverty, negative peer influence, or official neglect, others related to untreated mental health problems or substance abuse, and still others to more basic features of human decisionmaking that are particularly prevalent among young people and lead to impulsive, short-sighted actions. These contributing factors for criminal behavior may interact and reinforce one another in complicated ways. Yet there is currently no adequate forum for bringing together researchers from economics, sociology, criminology, demography, psychology, law and other fields to promote inter-disciplinary discussions relevant to the study of crime. A second limitation of crime research by American scholars in particular is that it tends to be provincial, and so ignores potential insights derived from variation in policy and social conditions within or across other countries. This summer workshop will bring together economists and non-economists, from the U.S. and elsewhere, to discuss empirical research related to crime. The theme of the workshop is the potential of social policy as a tool for crime prevention. This theme is motivated by a growing line of research that examines the possibility of efficiency gains from redirecting resources from selected criminal justice activities to evidence-based social policy interventions. The intellectual merit of this workshop comes from the opportunity it affords to bring empirical researchers from a wide range of disciplines together to discuss crime, thereby enriching the interdisciplinary nature of research on crime and enhancing the theoretical study of phenomenon related to crime. There are also potentially important benefits to society as a whole from this project. Since 1970 the incarceration rate in America increased nearly seven-fold. Financial problems have forced a number of states to dramatically reduce their prison populations, while a growing number of policymakers have expressed interest in whether there are lower-cost alternatives to mass incarceration for preventing crime. Participants in this workshop will explicitly explore this possibility.